30 like a basketball court, where people show off their hundred-and-fifty-dol- lar sneakers. Everybody's on the same team. Everybody interlocks." A gray pickup with a surf rack on its top and an "IRONWORKERS LOCAL" decal on its side pulled up, and the driver flashed a thumbs-down gesture through the windshield-the international hand signal for "Lousy waves today." Sena's entanglement with surfing began in 1964, when he was in the sixth grade, and surfing was a crewcut sport freshly imported from California. "Everybody had a paper route," he recalled. "That's how you earned your surfboard. This was our life. Nobody wanted anything else. My next-door neig hbor got us all started, and then he went to Vietnam and never came back. Those guys who did return got right back on their boards-a lot of those old-timers still surf here." Sena added that he attended Salesian Junior Semi- nary, in Goshen, for a year and then dropped out, returned to Rockaway, and began constructing surfboards in his parents' two-car garage. When neighbors grumbled about the stench of fibreglass, he left the garage, and moved on to a series of progressively grander facilities. He opened the cur- rent shop, on 116th Street, in 1979. There are times when the seminar- ian prevails over the entrepreneur. When a nun from St. John's Home for Boys, four blocks down the beach, stopped in last year to buy a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, Sena endowed the orphanage on the spot with some fifty pairs of surf shorts. And he has forged a working friendship with Father Bob Lawsine, a pastor at Rockaway's St. Thomas More-St. Edmund's Church, who works the shoreline during the summer wearing a tank-top T-shirt and cutoff shorts. "His mission is the beach," Sena said, "He's like Joe Surfer. Nothing freaks him out. He's on the boardwalk, he's in the parking lots-he's everywhere. He's magic." When teen-age participation faltered at the church two years ago, Sena gave F ather Bob a boogie board to raffle among the altar boys. "He ended up with more altar boys than he could handle," Sena said, and laughed. A skateboard, a surfboard, and surf trunks have also made their way from Sena's stockroom to Father Bob's par- ish. "He never asks," Sena said. "We have to push it on him." F or years, the Rockaway surfers con- fined themselves (in summer, anyway) to a zone the Parks Department des- ignated for them at Thirty-eighth Street-a blighted stretch of burned- out shanties and vacant lots patrolled CA f I J II U j 1 i O O SU 1 , ø , f I . 1,., 1 >}. ,'f t f I ^ '-w.. / J \\\ v . :: :::3. r,. :t" _ '" J .. ! . j i 1 1 \ J J>j J . .....,.. .3$ "'. ..,.. ,., ^ t ;,:. . .-.; "And at the end of the season the camper with the most merit points gets to be the star of next year's promotional video!" MAR.CH 12, 1990 by the occasional pack of wild dogs. Grim as it was, Thirty-eighth Street had one redeeming feature: a rock jetty around which peeled some of Rockaway's shapeliest waves. The city acknowledged the surfers' title to the place seven years ago by agreeing to rename the street Duke Kahanamoku Way, after a legendary surfer, who is to his sport roughly what Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio combined would be to baseball. Two years ago, with the new street signs still not up, crack dealers and their attendants took over the area. Surfers-some not yet teen-agers-were forced to pass by dubious characters conducting trans- actions through car windows. There were other hazards, too. "They'd watch from the weeds, waiting until we paddled all the way out into the surf," Sena recalled. "Then they'd break into our cars." Surfers who mi- grated up the beach in search of safer terrain were turned away by lifeguards and police. Last year, Sena conferred with J ames Breslin, the son of the columnist Jimmy Breslin, and a twenty-five-year Rockaway surf veteran, and he, in turn, phoned his boyhood friend An- drew Stein, the City Council president. An unlikely surfer-City Hall alliance was formed as a result of two huddles in Stein's office, and soon the Parks Department sanctioned a new surfing beach, fifty blocks up from Duke Kahanamoku Way, in a safe neighbor- hood of high-rise apartments, grassy plots, and food stands. "But we still want to go back to Duke Kahanamoku Way one day and put those street signs up," Sena said. By then, the name might really mean something. Sena told us he was collecting evidence that Kahanamoku actually surfed at Rockaway Beach while touring the East Coast after the 1912 Olympics, in Stockholm, where he won gold and silver med- als in swimming. Back in the Surf Shop, Sena unearthed a photocopy of a page from a 1912 issue of the Wave, the local newspaper, which had a one- paragraph item recounting Kahana- moku's weekend stay at the Rock- away home of Joe Ruddy, a former Olympic swimmer. If the Great One did sample the waves during that August stopover-and Sena thinks he was travelling with his board-it would, by Sena's reckoning, have been